Continued from part 4. This is the fifth of six parts: The Angolan passport ready, Boomi, Rajeesh, and Emil made the long trip by car from Cotonou, Benin, through Togo all the way to Accra, Ghana where Boomi would fly out of Kotoka International Airport. Still in charge of all the arrangements, Emil's smooth talk
By Xinlin Transient Workers Count Too sees many cases where an employer might consider early repatriation of a worker to be the best solution to avoid further costs, especially work injury compensation. This is particularly if the employer has failed to take up insurance, even though under Section 23 of the Work Injury Compensation Act
The most common question that people ask about the injured men who eat at The Cuff Road Project (TCRP) is whether they have lawyers to help with their case. Well, yes and no. Yes, they have lawyers, but no, the lawyers don’t necessarily help. TWC2’s Cuff Road Project feeds South Asian migrants who are not
By Benjamin Wong Sahabuddin is in pain. Sahabuddin wants to get rid of the pain in his back and return home, but he cannot do so. He has been waiting for an operation since April – he had to forgo a scheduled operation date for July 23rd, because his employer has not signed his Letter
By Francesca Kusmayati says her Singaporean employer asked her time and again to go to the airport to pick up new domestic workers arriving from abroad. The Indonesian domestic worker, who goes by the name ‘Yati’ says she wasn’t in a position to say ‘no’ to her boss. “I didn’t have a choice because it
By Arjun Naidu One June evening, at a coffee shop along Rangoon Road, construction worker Md Ebrahim Miah faced a stark choice. “Boss very angry,” he says. “Say, ‘now I give you ten minutes, you go back [to Bangladesh] or no?’” Though he didn't know it at the time, his boss had already cancelled his
Continued from Part 3 This is the fourth of six parts: On return to Cotonou, the immigration officials didn’t need to stamp his passport, because Boomi hadn’t crossed immigration in Morocco. His luggage was lighter by one large bag, which presumably had gone on ahead to Montreal. There wasn’t much of value in the bag
7 am on Saturday, 7 July 2012. Two heavily-tattooed Chinese men walked into a company dormitory and demanded that Md Mustakim Khan pack his belongings right away. "They say to me, 'Today your flight go home'," recalled the worker from Bangladesh. He protested that he had only just been given a 19-day medical certificate for
By Benjamin Wong TWC2 treasurer Alex Au went down the line of men queuing up to get their meal coupons at the charity's soup kitchen. "Salary case or injury case?" he asked each man in turn. At random, he pulled out two men with salary cases, and asked them to sit with me to recount
Continued from part 2 This is the third of six parts: Rajeesh was the only one who knew anything about the city of Cotonou, Benin, and having gone out regularly he had picked up a working knowledge of French. At the beginning of their stay, Liady Furaimo’s African friends would shop for the Indian men,
